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Meredith Bryson and Lauren Brown both credit Bridgerton, Julia Quinn’s popular historical romance series, for reviving their reading lives and inspiring them to open bookstores of their own.
“I got back into [reading] as an adult, actually with Bridgerton,” Brown said. “I watched the first season [of the Netflix adaptation], and then I was like, ‘I need more now, not in years.’ I picked up the books, and I read them all so fast. I haven’t stopped reading since.”
Both Bryson and Brown opened mobile romance bookstores in 2025. Bryson runs the mobile Durham-based Peach Basket Books, and Brown runs Rebel Romance Bookstore, a pop-up.
Novels from the Bridgerton saga now fill the shelves of Peach Basket Books—a pandemic-era dream turned reality.
“My fantasy was always to have my own little cozy bookstore,” Bryson explained, “[but] I like having the stability of a full-time job with benefits and just couldn’t see how I could become a small business owner full-time.”
Inspired by romance bookstores she had seen pop up across the country and the Triangle, Bryson found a solution.
“I ended up purchasing a really run-down camper in 2022 and spent several years renovating it,” she said. “I decided to focus on romance, because that’s the genre I love the most.”
Bryson operates her romance camper-turned-bookshop on a pop-up basis in and around Durham. She announces events on her Instagram (@peachbasketbooks), which are often hosted at local community spaces like Common Market and Ponysaurus.
In the time since she opened her camper and held her first pop-up event, in May 2025, Bryson says she’s noticed a shift in the ways that the genre is perceived and the popularity that has followed, with bookstores like Bright Side Books & Wine, the Triangle’s first and only brick-and-mortar romance bookstore, opening for readers.
There have been other big industry shifts: “Romance has come a long way from the original Bridgerton, which was written almost 30 years ago now, about a white family in London,” Bryson observed of the series, which got a cast of multiracial actors when Netflix launched an adaptation in 2020.
That broadening is exactly the kind of change that Brown also hopes to capture with Rebel Romance Bookstore, which she opened in August 2025. With the pop-up, Brown seeks to amplify the voices of marginalized authors and implement business practices that align with her values.
“I put a little business card-sized facts card [in each book], and it lets my shoppers know whether the author is local or part of the BIPOC, LGBTQ+, or disabled communities,” she said. “You see a lot of posts for Pride Month or Black History Month, and those are great,” she said, “and you support those fully, but when next month is Disability Pride Month, you won’t see anything.”
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